I think it offers enough in terms of building/customizing your chracter and affecting the story and relationship with other characters to be clasified as an RPG. But it's a pretty uninteresting discussion tbh.

You play a role and get the world/characters to view you in different ways. So I don't get what people expect an RPG to be.

Simply playing a role isn't sufficient. Technically you're playing a role when you play Super Mario.

Affecting the world as a direct consequence of your decisions, Is one valid requirement, but there are others. And that one requirement implicitly itself requires that the game provide you with menaingful choices.

I actually played all three, and the interactions were certainly meaningful. It's hard to argue that the decisions you made did not effect the game in any meaningful way. Let's just take Wrex:

"Wrex returns inMass Effect 2, provided he lived through the first game. [7]If Wrex survived, he is encountered on the krogan homeworld, Tuchanka, where he has united the various krogan clans under Clan Urdnot to strengthen his ailing race in the face of the genophage.[8]He has introduced many modernizing reforms to krogan society, but faces fierce opposition against more traditionalist clans. Should Wrex have been killed in the previous game by either Ashley or Shepard, the player will be sourly greeted by Wrex's brother, Wreav.

Wrex returns in Mass Effect 3, provided he survived the events of Mass Effect, and has become the de facto leader of the krogan. During a war summit between the Salarian Dalatrass Linron and the Turian Primarch Victus, Wrex demands a cure for the genophage. In return, he would deploy krogan troops to Palaven. Using leaked information, Wrex forces the Dalatrass to release a fertile female krogan who is immune to the genophage."

EDIT: People like to complain about the original ending in ME3, but after 300 hours of interacting with characters and making decisions that did in fact have direct and indirect consequences, I certainly have no complaints about the time I spent role-playing in the ME universe.

You play a role and get the world/characters to view you in different ways. So I don't get what people expect an RPG to be.

Simply playing a role isn't sufficient. Technically you're playing a role when you play Super Mario.

Affecting the world as a direct consequence of your decisions, Is one valid requirement, but there are others. And that one requirement implicitly itself requires that the game provide you with menaingful choices.

Having Choices in the Game don't mean Squat when the ending you get is the same.

One reason why Fable 2 got so much flak and guess what, Fable 2 is more RPG than Mass Effect.

You play a role and get the world/characters to view you in different ways. So I don't get what people expect an RPG to be.

Simply playing a role isn't sufficient. Technically you're playing a role when you play Super Mario.

Affecting the world as a direct consequence of your decisions, Is one valid requirement, but there are others. And that one requirement implicitly itself requires that the game provide you with menaingful choices.

When you play Super Mario you do not play a role. Mario is a pre-defined character, he does not change.

Yes, lots of Japanese "RPGs" get an unchallenged label of being called so and they can be even more linear and less stat and choice driven than the Mass Effect series is. And Mass Effect has more hurdles since it's sci-fi and not a generic fantasy setting of most RPGs.

If you take the most superficial aspects of Mass Effect like the alien races, and replace them with orcs and elves and dwarves and instead of a space ship you traveled on a dragon and instead of guns got bows and arrow and staffs for casting magic then nobody would argue it's an RPG. Fantasy settings have dominated the RPG genre far too long where something that is not so has to be challenged as not being an RPG.

You play a role and get the world/characters to view you in different ways. So I don't get what people expect an RPG to be.

Simply playing a role isn't sufficient. Technically you're playing a role when you play Super Mario.

Affecting the world as a direct consequence of your decisions, Is one valid requirement, but there are others. And that one requirement implicitly itself requires that the game provide you with menaingful choices.

When you play Super Mario you do not play a role. Mario is a pre-defined character, he does not change.

People really need to understand the difference between merely controlling a character, and actually role playing a character. They're not the same dynamic at all.

@Jankarcop said:

mass effect is a third person shooter. CoD has more RPG elements.

If you have to rely on hyperbole to make an argument, you really have no argument at all.

And people always talk about the elements, but mechanics alone are only part of the equation of RPGs. Yes they have their part, not saying stats and leveling don't matter. But if that's all it took, then sure COD or Force Unleashed would count as RPGs.

The other side of the coin is the players ability to define their character, such that it becomes an extension of themselves, and not simply a puppet they're pulling the strings for, which is what you get in any action game. It all goes into the player determining their character development, not just in skills but in shaping the characters role in the story, where the player has interaction with the world around them through their character.

This type of experience isn't found in your typical shooter (Halo, COD, Killzone, Battlefield, Crysis, etc...) that is structured around linear story sequences with a pre-scripted avatar for the character.

I would say that the first one was without a doubt, the 2nd and 3rd ones took away too much of what would make it an RPG and placed it straight in the hybrid Box. They are not 3rd person shooters, but not wholey RPGs either, given that alot of the layers of choice and consequences were stripped out.

Certain choices are simply removed in order to have a bigger focus on battle and war. But if you sk if mass 2 or 3 are bad games? No, I simly can not bring myself to claim that they are RPGs, but I find it perfectly fine to say that they are RPG hybrids. Most modern RPGs are afterall.

It definitely is an RPG. And pretty good one at that. It has all the attributes - character developement, strong story that is impacted by players choices and I really feeled like Ms. Shepard (yep, my Shepard was a lady) when playing it.